Los Futuros Imaginados

l o s f u t u r o s i m a g i n a d o s 170 171 The sky falls to pieces in every city, the same green or grey sky, the same sky that fills with fears breaking locks, spying, blowing down windows and walls, opening each door without shame, without pause. The wind prevails and breaks geometries strangely foreign to figures and shapes; goes unabated through corners, clouds, every square, sleepless, in its flat stealth. No one’s in the streets, neither in the courtyards or the parks, no one pities the judgement of the night. But the night annoys, disturbs, now holds sway over the great avenues, the crossroads, the boulevards. The sky has stripped shames and pleasures. The wind doesn’t comfort neither heal, nor give respite. In every city it seems like death has opened its black pit of sulphur and rage and little is left then for the lone night now taking over the sea, the rivers, the hill: knife blade pulsating and sharp in the restless memory of the empty city. Just at midnight muffled noises are heard as if a thousand maggots crossed the garden or all those rats, hurt by hunger, went out of their frozen holes of silence. They are not the vermin neither the owls, nor the crows: it feels like the quiet quivering of women in labour or the song of those who go to the sacrificial stone, or the teeth grinding of a child in the battle. It is the dweller, the citizen, the man crawling slowly and restoring his breath after kingdoms and dominions lost or already dead. c a p í t u l o 2 . P o s i c i o n e s a r t í s t i c a s e n l a i n t e m p e r i e It is the owner, the master, the landlord, the possessor of shapes, the skilled architect, the only one who knows how to chase the night away, how to scare away the wind, the sky, even the angels falling by millons over the filthy streets. The order thickens, lines itself up, it prevails now and nothing is left outside the perfect circle. Slow relents the wind until it becomes black. The blueprint has arrived, the map of the exact untangling jungles, spreading the air out: The index that passes through the storm is back and keeps the fear of the gods in its pride. This city rejoices in its sure affliction, this city dresses itself in the middle of the desert. this city covers its eyes and falls silent when the birds fly out adrift. Reenacts carnivals, wakes up the dead, traces two thousand leaps over the mountain ranges. This city agonizing of rythms that it doesn’t dance and of phrases learned in a dead language. Will it have a happy ending, will it remember the touch of the trees, the fresh smell of night? It seems to have died this merry city. It seems there is no such alien city. It seems it remembers its most secret years and now shuts its walls in a sleepless face. The bellfry announces a morning on tenterhooks and a slow afternoon of rains from another time. // andrés morales n o c t u r n e o f s a n t i a g o